Morning Commute

Ok Go - Invincible
Akio Ushikibo - Rose's Cafe
Kevin Fowler - Don't Touch My Willie
Nick Lowe - Cracking Up
Wendy Carlos - Brandenburg Concerto #3, first movement
Hanson - MMMBop
The Beatles - I'm Down
Rolling Stones - 19th Nervous Breakdown
The Ocean Blue - Between Something and Nothing
John Yager - Benson, Arizona
Orbital - Halcyon (Live)
Jud Whedon et al - Bad Horse Chorus
The Seekers - Morningtown Ride
Queen - Killer Queen
Muse - Take a Bow

What Echoes Through My Mind

Last year, my pen posse friends, including ethernautrix, were with me over at Penopoly when we heard a rather amazing story of the past. During WW2, when Japanese Americans were rounded up for interment camps, a Japanese American family in San Jose packed their dry goods store into crates, put them underneath the house, then went off to camps.

Over sixty years later, the family wants to sell the house; the goods are still in crates that have never been unpacked because they were a reminder of the pain and considered unlucky, or at least unfortunate.

Our friend Roger bought the entire lot, and he and his assistants moved the crates and arranged the sale of goods. A few of the less valuable items he kept, including some pads that say "San Jose," which I now have one of. Every time I see mine, I'm sad and overwhelmed even though I wasn't alive during WW2, and had nothing to do with that family's misfortune.

So when I read stories like what happened to Saito, and I read phrases like, "We can never live here again," I understand it on a different level than I did before hearing about that earlier family's misfortunes on the other side of the Pacific.